What Is Your Procurement Firm Doing to Keep Your FF&E on Schedule?
What Is Your Procurement Firm Doing to Keep Your FF&E on Schedule? Late furniture is the most avoidable way to miss an opening Ask an owner or developer what went wrong on their last project and I’m sure lead times come up. FF&E lead time tracking is a less glamorous part of procurement yet one […]
Furnishing Amenity Spaces in a High-Rise on a Hard Leasing Deadline
Furnishing Amenity Spaces in a High-Rise on a Hard Leasing Deadline The deadline is the marketing photo, not the certificate of occupancy High-rise amenity FF&E in a downtown market runs on a clock most people set incorrectly. The instinct is to work backward from the certificate of occupancy or the building’s completion. The real deadline […]
How We Work With Design Teams: Meeting You Where You Are
How We Work With Design Teams: Meeting You Where You Are There is no single right way to split a project with a design firm Working with design teams on FF&E procurement is often described as if there is one correct division of labor. There is not. Every design firm has a different relationship to […]
OS&E Cost Per Key: What Select-Service and Full-Service Hotels Actually Budget
OS&E cost per key can often be an shot in the dark Many hotel budgets carry an OS&E line that was set during diligence, quickly, and by analogy. Someone remembered a number from a previous project, applied it per key, and moved on to the harder-looking problems. Then pre-opening arrives, the real par levels get […]
What Percentage of an FF&E Budget Goes to Freight and Installation
The soft costs are where FF&E budgets quietly go wrong A furniture budget built from vendor quotes is a budget built from roughly three quarters of the actual cost. The rest is freight, warehousing, receiving, installation, and the handling that moves goods from a factory to a finished room. FF&E freight and installation costs get […]
Why We Built Our Own FF&E Procurement Platform
Most procurement runs on spreadsheets and email. That is the problem. Ask a developer how they know where their furniture package stands and the honest answer is usually some version of: they email their procurement contact and wait. Somewhere behind that email is a spreadsheet, probably several, probably out of date, probably reconciled by hand […]
Hotel Renovation: FF&E Procurement on a Tight Window at Chesapeake Bay Beach Club
A renovation window that did not have room to slip Hotel PiP FF&E procurement operates under a constraint that ground-up construction does not: the property is a business. Rooms out of service are rooms not selling, which means the renovation window is set by revenue, not by convenience, and it rarely has slack in it. […]
Boutique Hotel FF&E: Why Character Is Harder to Procure Than Scale
Boutique hotel FF&E rewards the opposite of what scale rewards Furnishing a 400-room flagged hotel is largely a problem of volume and standardization: order the approved package, multiply it, manage the logistics. Boutique hotel FF&E is almost the inverse. The whole point of a boutique or independent property is that it does not look like […]
How to Build an FF&E Budget That Survives the Whole Project
A good FF&E budget is built once and defended for two years The FF&E budget is one of the first numbers that goes into a pro forma and one of the last that gets reconciled at closeout. In between, it gets tested constantly: by lead-time surprises, by tariff and freight swings, by design changes, and […]
Hotel FF&E Procurement: What Actually Determines a Clean Opening
Hotel FF&E procurement is judged on one day: Opening day Every part of a hotel project gets graded along the way. Hotel FF&E procurement gets graded all at once, on the single day the doors open and the first guest walks into a room that is either finished or obviously not. There is no partial […]